I Want to Read: Chéri

A few weeks ago, I felt like going to the movies. I'd planned to see Public Enemies. I love the book of the same name by Bryan Burrough, and I'd been waiting for it to come out for ages. Suddenly, when the time came....I found I wasn't in the mood to see it. I blame the slightly tepid reviews and, possibly, Christian Bale, whom I've never found to be particularly charismatic.

I was still ready to go to the movies, though. I recalled the positive review I'd read of Chéri, which was playing at the Angelika. Considering the price of movie tickets, especially here in the city, I normally try to save moviegoing for films that really demand the big screen (Star Trek, Up, etc.). Chéri, as you might expect, does not fall into that category, having a decided lack of special effects.

So I went on a lark, and it turned out to be great idea. The plot is quite simple: Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer) is an aging courtesan who takes the son of a fellow lady of the evening (Kathy Bates, awesome as always) under her wing. The son, called Chéri (Rupert Friend), is a bit aimless and dissolute, and his mother relies on Léa to help push him into adulthood. Of course, when the time comes, she expects Chéri will make a more suitable match. The problem being, of course, in the meantime, Léa and Chéri fall in love. Le sigh, I know.

It's a light film, although it's sad as well; sadder than I might have expected from the trailer. I've never found Michelle Pfeiffer to be particularly relatable in the past, but she did a fine job here. I also think it would be hard to dislike Friend (the blue-eyed Orlando Bloom, though I'm far from the first to make that comparison).

Altogether, I liked the film enough that I was interested in exploring the original book, which was written by Colette. Even better, I began to entertain the idea of reading it in the original French, with the hope that my knowledge of the movie's plot would be enough to guide me through any tricky passages. It hasn't gotten past the idea stage, yet, which is partly just because I can't walk into Barnes and Noble and buy the French-language version. I read a few paragraphs at Project Gutenberg and followed them without a problem, but I'm not particularly keen on reading the whole novel off a computer screen - or printing it out. Oddly, I'm not really compelled to read it in English. Funny that.

So we'll see. It would be an ambitious undertaking, but I would enjoy practicing my rusty French.

Bleak House update: more than halfway through. Oh, I can't wait to write about it!